Experiencing Displacement: The Transformation of Women's Spaces in (Former) East Germany

Based on a comparison of two different research projects carried out in (former) East Germany, this paper analyses the effects of German (re)unification and postsocialist transformation as a specific, gendered form of displacement. We show how new divisions between "public" and "private" have affected women's sense of self and identity, cautioning against the notion that geographical restructuring will inevitably result in an empowering dissolution of fixed, placebound identities. Instead, we emphasise that places are connected to identities through relations of power and social practices that create unequal conditions for engagement in the (re)production of space. Feminist approaches to citizenship are discussed as one way of challenging the current marginalisation of East German women in unified Germany.     

Belts vs. Blades: the Binary Bind in Iron Age Mortuary Contexts in Southwest Germany

The complex interplay between dress and identity has long been a subject of analysis in several fields of study, but until recently, the approach to gender in archaeological mortuary contexts has tended to default to a reductionist binary structure. The concept of intercategorical intersectionality (McCall Signs, 30(3), 1771–1800, 2005) as applied to dress and its material correlates both confounds and challenges this problematic and restricted view of gender in prehistoric societies. Data from an area of Europe in which Iron Age populations marked an interconnected set of social roles through the medium of personal adornment in mortuary contexts reveal significant ambiguities, including two related and apparently significant patterns: the relative under-representation of adult males as compared to females (with a correspondingly large “indeterminate” gender category) and what appears to be an exclusively (and improbably) “female” subadult elite group buried in tumuli. The complex interdigitization of gender with other social roles in mortuary contexts suggests that our interpretations of the early Iron Age burial program must be correspondingly flexible to do justice to this intersectional complexity.     

Migrant mothers and the geographies of belonging

Much academic research on migrant mothers focuses on mothers who are separated from their children, often through their integration into global care chains, or on mothers within the context of family migration. This paper argues that co-resident migrant mothers' experiences provide an important window on the complexities of the migration experience. Using a specific case study of Ireland, and drawing from a broader longitudinal research project that focuses on recent migrants, the paper explores migrant mothers' understandings and experiences of belonging and not-belonging. We argue that structural obstacles and cultural understanding of care actively conspire to undermine migrant mothers' potential to develop place-belongingness. Interviewees' discussions of their status as full-time mothers were often framed through images of ideal motherhood, but equally highlighted how the absence of affordable childcare and family members isolates them and prevents them from creating a sense of belonging outside of the process of mothering and the home.     

The woman of Pritschoena: an example of the German neolithic neurosurgery in Saxony-Anhalt

We present an outstanding example of successful prehistoric double trephination dating between 2700 and 2200 BC, most likely to the Corded Ware culture, at the end of the Neolithic Age. The particularity of this case is the presence of a double trephination, one frontal over the sinus sagittal superior and one parietal right. There is evidence that the patient survived months to years after the operations. The purpose of the procedure is not known. The case confirms the astonishing degree of technical skills reached in Saxony-Anhalt over 4500 years ago without anesthetic, antiseptic, or technologic aids.     

Eine Frage der Politik: Wissenschaft und Ideologie im 21. Jahrhundert

A Political Matter: Science and Ideology in the 21^st Century . In the last two decades, history of science and science studies have been quite reluctant to adopt the notion of ideology when analyzing the dynamics of science. This may be an effect of the decreasing popularity of neo‐marxist approaches within this disciplinary field; but it is also due to the fact that alternative approaches have been developed, for example Michel Foucault's notion of problematization, Roland Barthes' semiotic mythology, Bruno Latour's re‐interpretation of the ontological difference between fact and fetish in science, or Donna Haraway's semi‐fictional re‐narrations of the techno‐scientific world. This contribution undertakes to sketch the impact of two strands of 19^th century immanentism on the authors named above, and on their use of concepts related to the notion of ideology, namely fetish, fetishism, myth and mythology respectively. It is argued that in some respect, Marx' concept of commodity fetishism is worth being re‐examined, since it articulates a dialectical relation of ‘reality’ and ‘seeming’, and its impact on Barthes' mythology is deeper than it might appear at first glance.